This invention relates generally to product design, production and life management activities and, more particularly, to a comprehensive tool for supporting such activities to enable effective and efficient manufacture of products designed therewith.
The product manufacturing process conventionally includes at least a design phase and a production phase. During the design phase, the product to be manufactured is designed based upon the desired end use, known limitations associated with the product, such as physical and structural limitations, and process limitations related to the ability to produce the product. After the product has been designed, the production phase begins in which the product must be manufactured in accordance with the design as well as in an efficient and effective manner. The design and production processes often include time-consuming and inefficient procedures such as trial and error design, extensive product testing, and time-intensive manual research into product and material specifications and into previously developed design and process guidance information. Such processes adversely impact production of quality products in an efficient manner, and can result in manufacture of defective or inferior products.
Several methods and systems for supporting product design activities to alleviate the above-described problems are known in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,452,218 to Tucker et al. describes a system for determining quality levels for fabrication and assembly designs using information stored in a computer database. Using the information in the database and user supplied information, the system generates a worksheet that models the manufactured product. Prospective defects and design problems are then illuminated to prevent their inclusion in the final design.
Known design and production support systems such as that described by Tucker et al. are often limited in the type and content of information provided to the user for assisting the user in designing and producing the desired product. Although the system of Tucker et al. provides a user with a statistical analysis of the process entered by the user, it does not otherwise assist the user in designing an acceptable product and process for manufacturing the product.
It would therefore be desirable to improve the convenience and efficiency of the design and production process by providing a comprehensive tool, interactive with a user, for producing design and manufacturing process guidance information and process capability information directed toward specific design and production processes.
The limitations noted above are overcome by providing a method and system for saving and retrieving guidance information related to supporting product design and manufacturing activities. Specific process capability information and guidance information related to sets of standardized product attributes are collected and stored in a database. A user may then access the database through a suitable interface and design a product using any combination of standardized attributes. Upon each attribute selection, the system queries the database and retrieves the process capability information and/or guidance information associated with the received set of attributes. This information is then displayed to the user to assist in product design and manufacturing activities. The user may also group information retrieved relating to various attribute collections and generate composite checklists including ranked listings of relevant guidance information related to group. By employing this method and system for collecting, storing and retrieving process capability and guidance information related to product design and manufacturing activities, system users can view and reference a previously unavailable quantity of information specifically related to the product being designed/manufactured.